New year raises the eternal question: is it possible to live a life without crisps?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/13/stewart-lee-crisps-coren-observer

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Crisps. Those perfect golden wonders transform even the loneliest moments into treasured memories. Consumed with caution, crisps provide salty rewards for the dreary daily tasks of my paternal and professional duties.

As a child, every school holiday I would be left in the hot car outside a succession of Devon pubs with only a pint of Courage Best for company, while my father went inside to eat crisps. I associate crisps with freedom, maturity and independence. But, I wonder, would it be possible to live a life without crisps? For the crisps-eating broadsheet newspaper columnist, January is the perfect month to find out.

Little of significance happens in January. And yet we broadsheet newspaper columnists are still required to fill up space with our opinions. We are like dogs, involuntarily dry-retching up a wretched and unprofitable cocktail of acrid bile and foul gas, awaiting applause. Nonetheless, these columns won't write themselves, so earlier this week I began one of the standard New Year broadsheet newspaper columnist strategies: writing out a list of the names of famous people I imagined would be significant in 2013, based on information I have been sent in their press releases.

Then I realised that the list – youthful Irish rock band the Strypes, female-friendly porn star James Deen, American gun lobbyist Alex Jones, nutshell King of Comedy Jack Whitehall, and, representing women, celebrity diver and Sugababe Jade Ewen – was the same as one I had already filed for a rival Sunday newspaper, of people I imagined had been significant in 2012. As I lifted the first of the day's many crisps to my mouth, the solution hit me.

It was time to take the standard broadsheet newspaper columnist January fallback position and file a light-hearted, semi-serious piece about new year abstinence. Editors hope such pieces will reduce the deaths of the last generation of readers still paying for newspapers. Perhaps they may even hold the gadfly attentions of today's young people, who have mistakenly picked up a Sunday supplement thinking it was some kind of inky cloak, like Lady Gaga might wear. But I love crisps. And it seems I am not alone.

Jamie Merritt, writing in The Independent on Sunday this month, confessed "like many of my friends I'm still worried about how many crisps I consume and how often I consume the crisps. We're a close-knit group of crisps-loving late-20s professionals, who all ate crisps reasonably heavily at university, and while none of us has ever ended up in A&E on a Saturday night, it's fair to say that we still eat crisps more than we should." Merritt wrote that he hoped for a "more sensible relationship with crisps for all of 2013", and concluded, with the unconvincing desperation of a man doomed to live his life under the yoke of crisps, "Why don't you join me?"

It would be beneath TV's Giles Coren to pen a standard festive "giving up crisps" piece, and so The Times commissioned his wife, Esther Walker, to write one about what it was like to be married to someone who was giving up crisps instead. Esther Walker is the heir to the Walker's crisps dynasty, and showbiz cynics have suggested, unfairly, that Coren only married her to get access to free crisps; but her admiration for her husband is obvious. "Two months ago, my husband Giles told me he wanted to stop eating crisps," Walker writes, with painful honesty. "Being an alcohol and pub reviewer, Giles comes across an awful lot of bags of crisps with his name on them, sometimes literally. He'd be back, sometimes after 8pm, missing his sock, his blanket, or his sandal, but with his pocket stuffed with loose crisps from a visit to a crisps shop he could not even remember."

Peter Osborne, writing in The Sunday Telegraph, sounded to me like an old-school Fleet Street crisps-munch in denial. "I don't wake up yearning for crisps, like a man I knew 20 years ago," he honked. "He worked for the Evening News and used to bring a flask of ready-salted crisps, laced with plain crisps, with him into the office. In the end he turned into a giant crisp and blew away in the wind."

Osborne has the bullish machismo of the heavy crisps consumer, which I recognise from my own similarly transparent denials of crisps dependence. "Doctors [absurdly, in my view]," he continues, "advise that eating three to four bags of crisps a day – approximately half a large baked potato – is the maximum permissible for a man. Recently I'll do six or seven bags of crisps in an average day, which I don't regard as excessive. I only eat crisps at lunchtime if I go out drinking in a pub, which is not more than once or twice a day. I'll eat rather more crisps than this if I go out drinking at night with friends. But not that much more because I am one of those lucky crisps eaters who does not get violent or argumentative when I have had too many crisps to eat. I just get sleepy and want to go to bed."

Typically of Telegraph writers, Osborne even managed to put a rightwing libertarian spin on giving up crisps, pointing out that Hitler, from World War II's the Nazis, eschewed crisps, and describing all-round good egg David Cameron's well-documented weekend crisps-gobbling as "reassuring", before lapsing into another crisps-inspired reverie: "I like to arrive home around seven-ish," Osborne writes, "take off my crisp costume, put some empty crisps bags on my feet, lie down naked in the bathroom and pour a large bag of cheese crisps, mixed half-and-half with chicken crisps, on to the floor. Then I roll around in them, crushing them into tiny fragments, which I then lick up off the tiles. This is a very satisfying moment, when the cares of the day are lifted. Then I'll eat half a bag of crisps with dinner, before going to bed to think about crisps until I fall asleep on my pillow, which is a big multipack of crisps."

Sometimes, like my broadsheet newspaper columnist colleagues above, I think I, too, eat too many crisps. But in a moment of honesty, Peter Osborne imagines a life without crisps as something that "stretches ahead like a desert and fills me with gloom and terror". At least for me, at the moment, that gloomy and terrible crispsless terrain is varied by the opportunity, each January, to write a broadsheet newspaper column about the possibility of giving up crisps. But without crisps, I wouldn't even have that. At the risk of sounding Socratic, the crispsless life would not be worth living.

Stewart Lee's The Alternative Comedy Experience begins on 5 February, 11pm on Comedy Central.